Max Ernst

Alexander Iolas, Paris
Jackson-Iolas Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above

Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou & Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Max Ernst. Sculptures, maisons, paysages, 1998, no. 45, illustrated in the catalogue

"Max Ernst, Oeuvres de 1919 à 1936" in Cahiers d'Art, Paris, 1937, p. 87
Shuzo Kakiguchi & Tiroux Yamanaka, eds., Album surréaliste, Tokyo, 1937, p. 40
Max Ernst, Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and his Friends, The Documents of Modern Art, New York, 1948, p. 103
Max Ernst, Oeuvre sculpté 1913-1961 (exhibition catalogue), Le Point Cardinal, Paris, 1961, illustrated n.p.
Eva Petrova, Max Ernst, Prague, 1965, no. 41
Lothar Fischer, ed., Max Ernst in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbek, 1969, p. 86
William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, New York, 1968, no. 245, n.p.
Max Ernst, Écritures, avec cent vingt illustrations extraites de l'oeuvre de l'artiste, Paris, 1970, p. 59
Uwe M. Schneede, Max Ernst, Stuttgart, 1972, no. 251, n.p.
Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Oeuvre-Katalog, Werke 1929-1938, Cologne, 1979, no. 2106, illustrated pp. 276-77
Max Ernst, Retrospektive (exhibition catalogue), Haus der Kunst, Munich & Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 1979, illustrated p. 156
Max Ernst (exhibition catalogue), Fundacion Juan March, Madrid, 1986, illustrated n.p.
Max Ernst: A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart & Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 1991, illustrated p. 310

Very good condition. Carved granite. There is a one-inch long metal rod extending from the bottom of the work, which is original to the composition. Surface is slightly dirty, otherwise fine.
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Apart from sporadic Dada reliefs and assemblages, sculpture was of minor concern to Ernst until 1934, when Alberto Giacometti exposed him to a Modern style that drew heavily from non-European sources such as African and Native American art. "After completing work on his collage novel, Max Ernst spent the summer of 1934 as the guest of Alberto Giacometti at his house in Swiss Bergell. Giacometti...introduced him to the techniques of carving. Max Ernst wrote from the holiday resort of Maloja to the art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker in Zürich... 'Alberto and I have been seized with a fever to sculpt. We are working on large and small granite blocks on the moraines of the Forno glacier. These have been strangely carved by time, ice and the weather, and look fantastically beautiful, in themselves. Why not, then, leave the main work to the elements and be content with scratching our secrets into them, like runes...?' They had used a team of horses to drag the polished boulders to the front of Giacometti's house where Giacometti lived in Maloja. In the course of his stay there, Max Ernst worked on over twenty sphere-shaped and egg-shaped stones" (Max Ernst: Sculptures (exhibition catalogue), Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, 1996, pp. 69 & 71).

Ernst's figural sculptures typically derive from fantastic characters, such as the avian creature Loplop, and their features take shape through the artist's playful manipulation of found objects. Jürgen Pech writes of Ernst’s sculpture, “His sculptural oeuvre is continuously characterized by playful treatments of simple forms and commonplace items. These objects are called into question and wrestled from their everyday functionality. Their identity is annulled and expanded, their meaning transformed and poeticized. Like his work as a whole, Ernst’s sculptures offer a view of a cosmos full of discovery” (Max Ernst, Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Albertina, Vienna & Basel, Foundation Beyeler, 2013, p. 296).